Kazan eBook

July and August of 1911 were months of great fires
in the Northland. The swamp home of Kazan and
Gray Wolf, and the green valley between the two ridges,
had escaped the seas of devastating flame; but now,
as they set forth on their wandering adventures again,
it was not long before their padded feet came in contact
with the seared and blackened desolation that had
followed so closely after the plague and starvation
of the preceding winter. In his humiliation and
defeat, after being driven from his swamp home by
the beavers, Kazan led his blind mate first into the
south. Twenty miles beyond the ridge they struck
the fire-killed forests. Winds from Hudson’s
Bay had driven the flames in an unbroken sea into
the west, and they had left not a vestige of life or
a patch of green. Blind Gray Wolf could not see
the blackened world, but she sensed it.
It recalled to her memory of that other fire, after
the battle on the Sun Rock; and all of her wonderful
instincts, sharpened and developed by her blindness,
told her that to the north—­and not south—­lay
the hunting-grounds they were seeking. The strain
of dog that was in Kazan still pulled him south.
It was not because he sought man, for to man he had
now become as deadly an enemy as Gray Wolf herself.
It was simply dog instinct to travel southward; in
the face of fire it was wolf instinct to travel northward.
At the end of the third day Gray Wolf won. They
recrossed the little valley between the two ridges,
and swung north and west into the Athabasca country,
striking a course that would ultimately bring them
to the headwaters of the McFarlane River.

Late in the preceding autumn a prospector had come
up to Fort Smith, on the Slave River, with a pickle
bottle filled with gold dust and nuggets. He
had made the find on the McFarlane. The first
mails had taken the news to the outside world, and
by midwinter the earliest members of a treasure-hunting
horde were rushing into the country by snow-shoe and
dog-sledge. Other finds came thick and fast.
The McFarlane was rich in free gold, and miners by
the score staked out their claims along it and began
work. Latecomers swung to new fields farther north
and east, and to Fort Smith came rumors of “finds”
richer than those of the Yukon. A score of men
at first—­then a hundred, five hundred, a
thousand—­rushed into the new country.
Most of these were from the prairie countries to the
south, and from the placer beds of the Saskatchewan
and the Frazer. From the far North, traveling
by way of the Mackenzie and the Liard, came a smaller
number of seasoned prospectors and adventurers from
the Yukon—­men who knew what it meant to
starve and freeze and die by inches.